OT: RE: My correct email address...

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009, John Esak wrote:
>Hi Richard, 
>
>I might as well use your email to clear up for the list benefit as well.

Responding to the list as it may benefit all.

>I have a kind of double access to the list as john at valar.com and also
>john.esak at 21appr.com.  If you are writing to me, please use the
>john at valar.com.  The 21appr.com will still work, but I ought to straighten
>it out with Bill or Mark to use one or the other. It should be the
>john at valar.com.  I'll write to the list runners and get that fixed.  It has
>just been impossible to keep straight whether I'm replying or writing from
>my office machine or my home machine.  How does everyone else keep it
>straight?  One machine defaults to the work email as the sending email and
>one to the home email.  It's kind of hard to do it any other way. Does
>anyone else have two membership addresses?  I'll limit mine to
>john at valarc.com, but what was happening is I would reply as the other
>address and since it wasn't a legit membership here, Mark or Bill would have
>to catch it and deal with it manually.  Finally, Mark just aliased the two
>so I can work as either one. But, it is obviously complicating things and no
>one knows where to really respond.

The only address on the list is the john at valar.com one.  When
John posts from the other address, the message is held for
moderator approval as coming from a non-subscriber (unless Mark
changed this :-).

>I have the mail from lists at celestial going into an fplist mailbox folder on
>each machine. It's just that Outlook is not capable of using separate
>default return (or originating) addresses for different folders.  At least,
>I've looked and don't see any way to do that.  Oh well, I'll just be more
>careful to manually always switch to the john at valar.com from now on, and
>I'll send a note to the list runners to remove the john.esak at 21appr.com,
>which I think is the current main membership... Aliased to john at valar.com.

That sounds like a problem with Outlook.  I don't use GUI mailers
very frequently, much preferring mutt, the crufty character
mailer, that allows me to specify return addresses based on the
recipient address.  When I press ``L'' to respond to this list,
the mutt_hooks sees the recipient address and adds the correct
headers for From: and Reply-To: as it does with other lists.

This is very handy for me for mailing lists and as I used tagged
e-mail addresses such as somevendor at celestial.com whenever I have
to provide e-mail on web forms and such (having one's own mail
servers that make this easy is nice :-).

I thought that Thunderbird allowed per-folder addressing, but
couldn't find it when I just looked.  Apple's Mail.app doesn't
seem to have it either.

The Claws e-mail program may well be the GUI mailer that I used
for a while that provided this capability.  It's been several
years since I tried Sylpheed-Claws, but it was very impressive.
It is available for Linux, Windows, and says OS X, but the OS X
download page came up empty when I just tried it.

>I'll get it sorted out and become just myself again as  a list member.  But,
>for those who use Outlook (sorry) I am curious as to how you get your
>personal/business email addresses going in and out properly. Since you only
>have one "default" address for sending or responding (each mail account), do
>you each have to remember to change the "account" with Alt-N on every
>message wo which you respond?  Sort of a hassle.
>
>For those who care about the gory details. On Outlook... You must choose a
>default email account... So here is a simpler lay out of my question. It's
>really no big deal, but I don't remember Mark or Bill telling me it has been
>a problem with anyone else.  Does everyone just subscribe as a home and work
>email account, and *remember* to reply with the correct account?

That must have been Mark as I don't ``Do Windows''.  I have
recently installed VMware Fusion on my new Macbook Pro, and have
XP Pro running on it for testing purposes, but rarely start it
(mostly to use an ACBL convention card editor as I haven't found
one for anything but Windows).

One possibility would be to set up a VPN connection to your home
machine from the work one or vice-versa, and set up an account in
Outlook for each.  I do this whenever I'm out of my office using
OpenVPN to connect.  Saying this, I just noticed that the OpenVPN
tunnel was still active from my weekend in Portland so my
connection to the LAN was a bit convoluted, WAP->OpenVPN Public
IP server->LAN instead of WAP->LAN which isn't the most efficient
way to run a connection, but it still works.

Using VPN clients such as OpenVPN simplifies many things as one
has access to the private LAN over a secure connection.  This
wasn't really practical on dialup connections, but is very useful
now that broadband is generally available.  I really like OpenVPN
as it works fine when the client is behind a NAT firewall which
is problematic with IPSec VPNs.

>In other words, the list sends you an email to fred at buck.com, but you also
>work for united_figs, which has an address of fred at united_figs.com.  Outlook
>has two separate accounts, "buck" and "figs".  If you're like me, you have
>Outlook retreive the mail from each account one after the other.  You dump
>all incoming mail to your business address into a folder called WORK, so
>that's simple. But, email retrieved for the personal account say like mail
>from the fplist goes into a FILEPRO folder. Whether you are reading and
>replying in the WORK folder or the FILEPRO folder, you must do it as one or
>the other main accounts, and if you want to reply as the "other" account,
>you have to remember to manually do it.  Is this the pain everyone goes
>through?

I strongly recommend that people use IMAP accounts and leave the
mail on the server, not bringing it to the local machine.  This
avoids problems with losing data on the local machine (always a
problem with Windows), allows one to switch e-mail clients
easily including webmail access if necessary, and makes it easy
to handle e-mail on the server, particularly if one uses Maildir
stores where each message is in its own file on the file system
(I won't address the evils of MS-Exchange).

>Remember, this is just a question for those *forced* to use MS Outlook.  I'm
>just assuming MUTT and virtually any Linux mail client can do it in a more
>sophisticated or controled way.
>For now, still locked to the Outlook.

I would definately use a VPN with separate accounts for each mail
server.  I did learn a bit while responding to this on the
limitations of Linux/OS X GUI clients that aren't as smart as I
thought they would be compared to mutt.

>There is only one INBOX, one folder for FPMIAL, etc.  So, the business mail
>and the personal mail get mixed together.  Please don't tell me you make an
>INPUT_bus and an INPUT_per.

We presort incoming mail to different IMAP folders on the server.
Mailing list mail goes to the bulk folder, mail from customers to
the customer folder, postmaster to postmaster, etc.  On the
client site, all I see are the IMAP folders, and don't do any
client site routing as the mail stays on the server.

Now that you've gotten me on this subject, I will probably have
to try Claws again, but since the Mac OS X download page doesn't
seem to work, I will have to build the X11 version myself.
Thanks for getting me sidetracked :-).

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
Voice:          (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
Fax:            (206) 232-9186  Skype: jwccsllc (206) 855-5792

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